^{Summer semester 2026}
"_{Bigger you wanted too"
Creativity and illness since Hölderlin}

Karl Jaspers saw modern attempts to think creativity and illness together as a challenge: "Pathography is a tricky thing." A hundred years ago, the philosopher himself presented case histories between psychiatry, literature and art with Strindberg and van Gogh , which elevated Friedrich Hölderlin to the status of a legendary figure. The psychological suffering had made his verses even more profound. Fifty years later, the poet became an icon of anti-psychiatry, holding up a mirror to society in his madness.
Sigmund Freud used Michelangelo's Moses as an example to develop psychoanalytical ideas on creativity. Friedrich Nietzsche was his ingenious predecessor in psychodynamic thinking, who ultimately fell into madness himself as the author of Antichrist . Thomas Mann followed in his footsteps in German history to the end, gripped by melancholy. Rainer Maria Rilke therefore appears today as a poet of anxiety who was sensitive to the diagnosis of his time. Viktor von Weizsäcker explored pain psychosomatically, as did the writer Ernst Jünger.
William James, influenced by Tolstoy and Nietzsche, classically outlined how the emergence of lasting words and ideas in the mentally ill can be thought of pragmatically. Franz Kafka lucidly outlined this riddle not only in his diary. Unica Zürn lived and died in the abysses of literary and visual art. Ingeborg Bachmann remained a rebellious artist on the fringes of European society, whose work reached to the point of self-destruction. The fact that creative powers are enormously stimulated by the coincidence of illness is the legacy of classical modernism in novels, essays and poetry. Virginia Woolf also knew this, and today she is representative of female poets who are able to transform the unfortunate loss of health into literary happiness in a marvellous way.